Chapter
For Timmy’s funeral their Alpine friends and Happy Vally family gathered in the FARMS Commons with their laptops. Bruce filmed Annie stapling quilted white satin onto one of Alaya’s Grandpa Le Baron’s shoe boxes. Ai de mi to put Alaya, la innocente, into the Earth with a carved stone above her grave, far from Annie’s remote Colonia the Alpine some of the garden crew sobbed. Grandma LeBaron groaned.
Karina and Bruce were downwinders. People down South to Grandma and Grandpa Country continued their service to their country as NTS/AEC lab rats. In the late 70’s there were unsuspected aspects of Natural Law--surprises called entropy, protein cascade. While maintaining their happy, happy, happy way of Life. The unhappy were excluded? It was one of the things the poligs thought wrong, most of them, and a reason they kept to
themselves and their families.
Karina sang what her kids called the ghost song when she took them with her on her bedtime walk. Kathleen’s defender, Bruce’s Mother’s homeward low rider pasado came upon her singing on the commons, singing under a full moon while sitting on her heels, picking green love apples with gloved hands, putting them into her big basket.
The Professor put his arms around Karina and his shoulder absorbed her sobs. To those who had known Kathleen, Karina was like her. Kathleen was of tender years when he left home. He rightly feared her her innocent wildness. Now there were 5 years between them and Kathleen, despite what Ginny could do, had been robbed of life and possesions, never again at her ease.
Russ set up a reunion for his mother and her homeward friends, including Kathleen’s Mother. He held her over, but those with enegmatic, complex, multisystem , were to Kathleen’s mother’s generation what the Jews had been to the Nazi’s. A place for everything and everything in its place and them for the trash. Kathleen’s place was completly out of sight where she could not embarrass their respectable family. They had a good fammily, a righteous family, why let Aunt Kathleen be the spoiler.
Chapter
Karina’s Timothy died of Leukemia when he was 5. The professor packed a big picnic lunch when they left for Sinaloa with Timothy’s box coffin, a compartment for dry ice put in beneath.
At Timmy’s funeral the Nuns sang Ai de mi Llorona for their weeping mamacita--inwardly railing at their Husband, el Senor.
They had . Sometimes Daddy put a video cam of Timmy’s funeral on so that Livvy and Rigel would understand. They had a sister and brother who had died. Aunt Kathleen had an Aunt Kathleen who died of what her Aunt had, right after the Second World War. The Chinese found the Manchurian lab and whitepapers--plans for flying small American planes into the South West to scatter virus over the cattle range. There would be no refueling, it was a Kami Kazi mission.They caused 150,000 cases of Bubonic plague in the hills of Harbin.
[website, needs citation.
Bruce replayed the podcasts from when Alaya had died to cover his absence. He had recycled the CD. Fifteen minutes of Bruce’s flea circus routine were left over when the funeral. The humor kept the kids from crying--helped them all settle down.
Bruce and Sam got into fleas and magic tricks in Junior High, this was when Bruce and Sam’s birthday busines jetted to success, yes the amazing Anders brothers and their Fleeeeeea Circus.
Bruce sang and rocked Karina when she woke up crying over her lost babies. Sometimes Alaya would seem to talk to her in dreams.
Timmy was with ‘Lya in the dreams but shadowed, having died in so much pain, and not at peace. Their Kathleen had an Aunt Kathleen who died of what she had, right after the Second World War. She never woke up like the story of Sleeping Beauty. Her death certificate said Encephalitis, Pharangitis, and Necrosis of the pons. It was in Kathleen’s papers.
Timmy died right after 911. Bruce feared trouble taking Timmy across the border so Sam and Bruce flew Karina and the small casket down from Dunfy, New Mexico where they kept their plane with the Goth driving his sisters down.
Chapter
Bruce regretted his contract to write a Priesthood Guide for Fathers, Volume One. The dust bunnies were right. Irony was rife. But how he struggled to support them all. The Order was never an easy thing to live.
The comittee at BYU had the final editing of the book and had given him a generously detailed outline to use in his writing. Like the bones of the book, Celestte said. In small white letters on the cream back cover, the finished book would say, The Smith Center Values Clarification Project, Bruce Lawrence Anders et. al.
Since the first Chapter was “Familiy Unification for Eternal Life,” Bruce sought his Aunt on Google. It took him an hour a week for a month.
She was in Florida. Bruce’s first wonder was how in heck did she get to Florida, and why. Were the Oranges cheaper in Florida? He seemed to remember that his mother had called her sister “the fruit fly.”
He flew East to his Aunt and her friend Ginny. Ginny was quite old with skin that was losing its aged look, a five year old son, cloned from her father. She was pregnant with a girl, conceived in a petrie dish by parthenogenisis, a process which, the precocious five year said proudly, occured in nature. Ginny and her husband Ross ran a fertility clinic. Yes, that might weird his mother out, if she knew. The laws against it seemed cruel now, decades later--it was easily enough done. They had had no failures.
If his Grandmother and Mommy Linda knew how many more ideas lived outside Utah than inside it. They never let on except when discussing the dangers of College education, using Aunt Kathleen the poster child.
Bruce never told his mother that he’d found Kathleen. His kids knew never to tell Grandma Linda anything, not about their other Grammies or their new baby Aunt. Ginny said she could help them have heal their babies. Linda insisted that all Kathleen’s friends were homeless, living on the streets or dead.
Bruce asked Kathleen if she’d kept in touch with her SLZ companeros. He found out that he and his sister Aspen were on a list to acsess her Aunt’s papers a few decades before anyone else, so was Bruce. Uncle Samuel had not mentioned it.
Kathleen’s work as a drug treatment counselor and crisis counseler. This fed the drug addiction rumor. Kathleen detailed the cases she went out on daily, sometimes recycling her phone counseling sessions as short stories.
So was how much she wanted to write the Great American novel. 60,000 words a month, so wrote Bob Morrow, the French Horn playing Bill Morrow Jr. who lived behind her over-aged fiance’s house. It was during Watergate and all they talked about was Watergate, like it was a sport. He had kids who wanted their mother back. Kathleen wished Death were more generous. They wondered why she wanted a man who already had a wife, a question she shrugged off, saying she thought she'd like their mother fine.
The Homeward low low rider taught Family Relations at the Y. He headed the Commitee for Bruce’s “A Family Guide for Fathers.” They lived in the same ward in Alpine and were assigned to adjacent strips of the village commons, so they could tak as they worked. It was a project threaded through the FARM green-project, eating mutton and selling wool from Alpine’s imitation Scott’s sheep lawns, leaving the kids just enough room to run on its paths.
Another homeward friend was a tenured Professor of Church History and an archivist at BYU. He had a brother Kathleen’s age who shared a water cooler with Bruce when he was in town.
When Bruce was in he was soon inducted into the Lobster Quadrille. They met by the water cooler to reherse Bruce’s Operetta, due to premiere in the Alpine gardens. The kids made up signs and handbills.
Once they got the green tomatoes out for chutney and the turnips and parsnips, onions and potatoes partly dug up, it made a nice space for dancing--for the flea circus and the performance of the Lobster Quadrille in which each had a part. The Homeward Lobster was firmly regarded to be the cutest boy in Kathleen’s Grade at Linda Vista School. He stopped by just before supper to play Caroll Logic games with Kerry and Celeste.
He went to La Baron family church and dragged his brother along--they quietly believed that the Fundamentalists persistance had historical and cultural value, but it was illegal, of course. Living in
sin was a social convention. practiced by all religion, never sacred,
like the Principle.
Chapter Three-- The Lobster Quadrille
Bruce was not invited to the childrens meeting so he suited up. Garbed in his footsie bunny PJ’s he did a belly flop onto the family waterbed. He slept so deeply he forgot he was asleep. Daddy Bruce, engulfed in water, imagined that objections to Daddy Bruce’s birthday failure were even now being emailed by Livvy all over creation. He figured she’d make a likely apostate.
Bruce worked for the Prez, who was their Great, Great Uncle twice removed on the Anders’ side so they could call him. They complained that their father would barricade himself in his room for weeks, writing, while his children provided room service.
Earlier in the day of the birthday meeting, Kerry had harvested dry Scarlet Runner Beans with Aunt Kathleen’s former low rider who taught at the Y. He had heard now and again that Kathleen was ill but had not connected her with the noisy, polygamous, Anders. He came up with the notion of having Bruce put in a Chapter on Family alliances, fragmentation and reunification. Eternal Family seemed less likely if this one was going badly and if people were always
focusing on who was most convenient to exclude. Kerry laughed bitterly. Boy was Mommy Linda and her brother way
into that one, and the Prez knew it. Funny, how they never said their
Uncles' name. except for Sam. Aunt Kathleen had reared the boys.
Bruce wished he could do something for Kathleen. His family had sold the land on which her Yurt had been the boys' whose parents lived with her, Castle. It was well built of cedarwood and madrone, its sections bolted strongly together and easily unbolted. A friend, an engineer, finished the inside. It had a cathedral ceiling and windows that tracked the year like a primitive astrolabe. It was to her a place of beauty, prayer, peace--a good place to live and die.
Her deck faced East to embrace sun and moon and Stars and past
an future-- she sat on her deck and watched the stars. She planted easy vegetables every year--tomatoes, squash and scarlet runner beans, which was her favorite bean. She’d started planting them as flowers in fifth grade.
When her mother took that from her she lived in a friend’s dark garret for 10 years and wrote, wanting to die and clinging to life. There were after all, books to finish. Books still unthought of,
it was only a matter of endurance.
Bruce remembered Aunt Taff’s scarlet runner beans from San Francisco. They were next to the garbage cans, corroded at their ancient tin bases in Kathleen’s garden at the bottom of the stairs in San Francisco. Her flowery beans grew three stories high and impressed the four year old Bruce. So Bruce called them “Jack in the Beanstalk Beans.” Still did, off and on. But they couldn’t be climbed up into the clouds where there was an ogre.
“I should have married your Aunt myself” the lowrider said to Kerry when they were shelling dried beans from their rattling husks. When I was 18, she was 13--by the time she was 18, I was married and divorced and she was starting college.
“She would have loved your father. Sounds like the Dude’s just not around. She spent alot of her time dodging blows. I knew her boyfriend. He hated to leave her in that house.”
“In my family, the women are sweet as Tupelo honey, my Dad raised Doves.’’ The former low rider beaned the Goth. But you know, people don't forget, if I'd gone for her, well, I don't think her family would have approved.”
Bruce tried to ask Grammy Linda about Kathleen’s homeward friends. All she could get out of him was that the Professor
used to smoke dope. Her father told Linda to keep an eye on her sister. The sister-spy. Now their kids grew hemp in the watergates. It was a good place to soak the leaves and stems off the fiber. Then they combed the long, tough strands. These wore like iron and sold well for weaving rugs.
The bottom line was that Linda’s home ward low rider headed Bruce’s book committee, so her objections to her family’s associating with such former evildoers fell flat.
On the night of the children’s meeting, after bad Daddy Bruce went to get his beauty sleep, Livvy got her wireless. Livvy dictated her complaints to Celeste, who was 13+. Livvy laboriously tapped her abc’s into her think pad to send to Uncle Sam. Livvy called him Great Uncle Sam.
Uncle Samuel always helped, even when he was bluffing or just citing the Principle of the Seperation of Church and State. ''Oh, THAT Uncle Sam.'' The Goth whined and left the room because Uncle Sam knew he was Mexican, that was because he was premature.
Uncle Sam had been their Aunt Kathleen’s friend, though they generally fell out in wartime. It was true, as the professor said, that Aunt Kathleen was a peace-nick. For bedtime snack, the Goth made cowboy coffee cake. He wrote in the family journal that Grammy Linda didn’t know as much as she thought she did about Kathleen.
Livvy was practicing for her call to the Spruce Goose.
Birthdays were like Christmas. You couldn’t just cancel them.
Sometimes Christmases didn’t go so well, like the year Mommy and Daddy and Timmy wen’t to Grammy Linda’s for Christmas. Timmy layed down on the couch and died. Everybody was saying hi and hugging and happy and the Tabernacle Choir was singing on the TV. They liked Mommy to tell them the story about when Timmy died. Sometimes it was sad and made her cry, and sometimes it seemed
funny and made her laugh.
Mommy said his color didn’t seem right, then she held him to her and began to wail. She pulled his blanket off the couch and pulled it over her head so it was wrapped around them both and locked herself in the bath. Grammy Linda wanted to call an ambulence, but Bruce had arranged a DNR order with their Doctor and his letter in his wallet. I was a matter of days or weeks or maybe a month. Karina’s letter was in her purse. A child should not suffer like that so his grandmother could feel like she could hold her head up in the community.
Their Doctor said if there was trouble, Karina’s Doctor, a Suni polig, who laughed very loud, said to call him at one of four numbers. He’d get back to her on which one. Now if he was Mormon, there would have been a rotation. Grandpa Le Baron was spending two years at Ramona’s and her sisters, which was where he was now, which left he and Grammy and Annie and his East German Anna and children sneaking around.
Chapter
Then the big fight started. Karina was glad to be locked in the bathroom with Timmy, singing him the lullabies he liked the best while his skin took on a bluish tint and was chilled.
“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll
blo-o-o-w your house down.” But Daddy wouldn’t let her.
Grammy Linda started pleading, then accusing Karina of being a murderer. Of not being normal, of being just like Aunt Kathleen, of Karinna going to jail for the rest of her life, Grammy Linda would see to that. They’d take Timmy away and she’d do it too, because Grandpa had been an Army Medic. That was sad, because there just wasn’t time. Timmy was slipping away.
Timmy would be just fine--go to his Heavenly Father forever in their forever family without all the talk the home death would generate.
Grammy Linda said to Gramps they were going to the Hopspital even if she had to break down the door. When her turned on the engine and left it running Karina began to wail again. That’s when Daddy did the unexpected. He often accompianied the Prez as a medical attache and in case of an assination attempt he had to carry a gun which he hardly ever used except for target practice on Holidays. It matched his Air Marshall's uniform which he wasn't wearing. He had it in it's holster.
It being Christmas, he pulled out his revolver and sat on the floor, his back to Karina’s through the door except for whispering and people takig off in every diretion like frightened Christmas geese at the sound of a Shotgun. As though Death and Christmas had never before shared a table.
It got very, very quiet for a long time. Karina went on rocking her baby and singing quietly, A Catholic song, in Spanish, Ave Maria. Bruce was doing tricks with his 38 and his father was sitting at his chair like a troll that hadn’t gotten into his cave before that first ray of sun peeked over the mountain just as he was heading into it’s cave. He realized this, and got
his gun out to clean.
Bruce's sister had borrowed Morphine and a syringe from a Cancer patient and had flagged down the Le Baron Convoy as it pulled off the highway and settled in a big parking lot. Grammy pulled over and they had a chat. Grammy said she'd wait for Karinna's call before they went on without her.
Dee had stopped by to rally a retired doctor. He stopped by to glance at Timmy and the Doctor’s name and number and a notarized copy of their letter and the doctor’s letter, he wrote a note saying that there was nothing to do but release the child and comfort the bereaved parents. No, he doubted there was anything t do about it if Bruce had the paperwork. As if by magic a Lawyer cousin in law, having his Christmas at his father in law's house came in the door with steps that were deliberatly slow.
Bojangles, as the kids called him because he liked to sing that song on the car, looked over the papers and said Karinna could come out, but, as the kids liked to sing, “You can’t make a Turtle come out.
Bruce picked the lock and went in and talked Karinna into to heading out to West to her family at the Rez. He called Grammy LeBaron's PDA and got her Secretary who said “Grammy is not to be disturbed unless it's an Emergency. She's driving now.”
Bruce said it was an emergency.
Timmy was still breathing, though faintly. Caleb said that if he didn't get pulled over they should catch up with them.
Chapter
Christmases seldom went right, not white ones. The next year at Grammy La Baron’s their dog tipped over the tree, trampled all the presents, and when the other dogs heard the ruckus they were all barking at the door to join in the fun. It was down on the river to Grammy Linda’s and Karinna called her Aunts Ramona and her sister who had gone into the Quick Stop because somebody had forgot to get whipped cream. Can’t have Christmas without whipping cream and the cows weren’t being generous that winter.
The kids decided to have future Christmas Dinners out at Ramona and her sister’s on the Rez. That would be better because Grandpa Le Baron’s birthday to spend Christmas out to the rez. This Christmas Karina needed her Daddy, and Grandpa would want to be there if Timmy was dying. The snow was shallow and crusted--maybe they could take the horses out visiting there, tell old stories about Mr. Kyote, and not come back ‘till New Years. Thats how they did it now.
The Christmas Timothy died introduced a new Christmas custom which Grandma Linda hated. Karina cried on Christmas, every Christmas. Even Klary and Kerry cried.
Last Christmas they decided they’d give it another try at Grandma Linda’s. Karina thought she’d go for a walk. Klary and the Golth followed and by the time they caught up with their mother she was stumbling up the hill, tears frosted on her face. Kerry wore a blanket and put one on Klary. They had a quorum when Celeste caught up with them and Kerry opened his blanket. They cried.
Grammy Linda came skipping up the hill with Daddy Bruce singing Jingle bell Rock. The Goth yelled down that they were happy as pie. Bruce spun Grandma Linda around and got her to sliding. The hugs decided they’d go out East and go for a horseback ride at Ramona and her sister’s and all their cousins, because it just wasn’t Christmas without.
*
Karina had packed a Christmas picnic with serviceberry pemmican and Matheson Razzleberry jam, some jerked venison and a bag of apples so they could make a fire and boil Wassail by Aunt Kathleen’s recipe she had a Christmas Cookbook for things they liked to have for Christmas when she was little--mince meat pie and all, but Linda was little and didn’t remember all that. On the cover there was a big Oak Table with Christmas dinner on it--Ginny wanted to buy the table but it was 5,000 dollars in 2020 dollars.
Great Grandma threw Kathleen’s things away when the doctor said she was going to die. That was twenty years ago. Her friends heard her mother was coming and saved what they could. The Realtor asked her what she was going to do with Kathleens effects, she shrugged and said she’d get someone in to clean it out. The curious thing was that Kathleen wasn’t dead yet.
Kathleen lived for 10 years in the Russian River Garret writing. The kids liked their Great Grandma but she and Grammy Laura made one another so much meaner that just Bruce went after the Christmas Timmy died. They said mean things about Klary and Kerry with Mr. Ky-ote’s snicker. Like they were already poligs--how could they be when they were just little kids.
The Professor knew them all well and told Kerry, the Autumn day he threw the rope of Scarlet Runner Beans at him, how sad, small and helpless he felt. If he couldn’t help his friends, who he knew well, how did he know he was helping anyone else, they were just strangers, and some strangers in a strange land.
CHAPTER
Kathleen was born after Bruce’s parents got married--8 years after the end of World War Two. Bruce was born 24 years later. Samuel and Kathleen’s screaming arguments were during Nam. That was when they were closest. They walked far away from the house, chasing Kyotes, because them talking made Kathleen’s father’s Battle Fatigue worse.
Grammy Linda knew little about the war except what her father said. Kathleen and Sam hanging on one another when he thought what Samuel was going back too--it made him hit Kathleen worse and Samuel hated to leave her. Sam’s cover was that he was a deserter teaching in an English School in a Thai Hamlet. Kathleen went with him and taught English there.
Livvy sent her IM to the Spruce Goose with her non-negotiable demands. None of this skipping his birthday for the first time ever. Unclr Sam called back and smiled broadly at his too often overlooked Olivia.
Kerry, born in Juarez, remembered that it was his night to do the dishes. His Dad had to stay off screen too. Grandpa Le Baron and Sam had gone to High School together. Polygamy was still illegal, though its illegality was unpopular and ignored. It was widely practiced except where it could not be entirely given up. On home turf it led to a kind of warmongering.
Uncle Samuel was cute. The press liked to make him spin a tale, then do an exposé--like the blather when they found out the elusive Sam’s father once shared a hospital room with the high profile polygamist Rulon Jeffs.
Chapter--
The Leavened Loaf
Ever since the manifesto the Fundamentalists had been hoping for the Savior to come. Grammy said their part was living the Gospel to the fullest or it’d be a world of crackers. They were yeast in the dough of the Church--unless a portion of the People lived the Gospel to the fullest the Milleneum wouldn’t come.
She said it wasn’t wrong for people to live outside of the Principle--many were called and few chosen. Only a few of the Brethren had ever taken plural wives, going way back to Joseph Smith, but for some reason their line always had more families in the principle than most.
Uncle Samuel went to Karina’s family chuch sometimes because he to make of Bruce and Karinna’s family, her first illigitimate child, her divorce from Kerry’s father her resemblance to Kathleen who never, it seemed, entirely left his mind.
Polygamy was a problem in Utah and he was expected to know what to do about it. It had been practiced for almost two hundred years by the Mormons, the Suni Muslims and the indigenous people almost everywhere had only stopped because they feared extinction. Now even African Anglicans practiced it-babies were getting harder to make and by teaming up a woman could still have a large and extended family.
Sam asked once asked Kerry at while hoeing a jumble of root crops what he thought about polygamy--did he ever think he’d go his father’s way.
The Goth said he was glad his mom got divorced and sent him and Klary to her Mother. It wasn’t right how his Father treated Klary and him, Principle or no. Sometimes people looked down on Karina because his father put on such a public act. It was awful that people thought every who lived in the Priciple was like that.
Grammy Le Baron showed up when his Mom was out of town with the ranch truck. . It wasn’t right or normal. It sure wasn’t living the Gospel to the fullest.
Klary was so absolutely normal and so headed for the Principle that Sam could hardlystand it. Kerry’s big bellied Goth girlfriend with the father muissing was a kick. Goths were forming pods and Kerry said Clara was attracted to the idea when they were out of college and settled it.
The purpose of their meeting in the beets, parsnips and turnips was to impress upon Sam that Clary’s baby’s father wasn’t just missing--they had to try to find the baby’s father but they’d lost hope. There was reason to suspect the neo-nazis, the spiders except they’d threatened him every day at school on behalf of their cool older brothers. Sam had to take it from here.
“Why pods?” Sam asked.
Kerry asked him whether he meant the name or the practice.
The pods didn’t get HIV, they saved themselves for their partners. Mostly it was non-Mormon Goths who made pods, and when a big pod got AIDS or a STD that could be very bad, they had to be careful. It wasn’t Father Knows Best, but it worked for them.
Grammy Le Baron’s generation their family conserved the past through righteousness. Kerry’s generation would have to create the future, maybe live in pods, they didn’t know and didn’t think about it. It was the non-Mormon pods who wrote and thought about it all the time.
“Lets just not have any trouble in the family over it.” Kerry said, using the shovel on a stubborn parsnip. Which is what his Grandmas and Aunts and Mom and Dad and Polygamist Grandpa said about everything.
Uncle Sam was irked about the Goths and Vamps. It seemed like the hippies just stayed hippies. Now they were old hippies, they didn’t have young hippies. The Goths sprang up like mushrooms, startling Sam and his Anthropological Handball Club. If there were war or peace, the young men and what they did and wanted to do was studied.
Klary took the sleeping Rigel to bed and took to her books, one ear waiting for his outragd complaint. Livvy was on her mom's lap, one sleepy ear on Bugs Bunny. Karina pulled the ring on Bugs and he said 'WAT'S Up Doc, ehhhhhhhh, WAT'S UP DOC.' '
CHAPTER
Hues of blue loti bled inward through Bruce's eyelids, negotiating his clarion vitreous humor, investigating his rosey malar disk.
''Qual azules d'los cielos, las niebla, y las montañas, y la tierra en la madrudgadra,’’ a voice trilled, a familiar girl’s voice, sweet as the dark trilling of the bats in their bat house. Clown-like creatures mimicked the antics of the children, sweetening the first light with sleepy mimicry.
Br uce thought a morning hymn was in order, but it came out all blue and silver bubbles. ’’What more can we say than to you we have said, you-who unto Jesus for refuge have fled.’’ Liquified his stream of bubbles sought the quicksilver surface.
‘’You who, Jesus,’’ Bruce called in his sleep, startling Karinna who had her knees up, collating data on her night computer. The time was close at hand for Father or Bunny, to, with manly vigor . . . all in favor of warrenting the proposition that dumb Daddy Bunny, was not only in trouble with the Corporation for ‘cuz he couldn’t make-work their birthday plans, the corporation was in trouble with them, and bad trouble.
He might as well just stay where he was, dissappear. The conspiracy theorists would be busy searching his watery grave for hints for years, dredging for his body, diving for his bones. The worst possible PR, and the acrylic treadmill coach would be the first to know.
'' I know our bats, Daddy, our funny-faced angels, they will bear babies soon. They kick out the bothersome little boys and never let them back in. We do with ours.
Bruce tried to remain calm and positive. lt was after all, presumably still the first day of the rest of his life/death bla bla bIa. A promising future awaits those who wait, said the fortune in his dollar store dinner fortune cookie at dinner.
Now was the time close at hand for Father or Bunny, to,manly with vigor. . . take a sabattical, alone. All in favor of warrenting the proposition that Daddy Bruce Bunny was a deadbeat Dad say Aye, the Ayes have it.
CHAPTER
''Our phantasmagoric Uncle Samuel,” Kerry said “is gonna be a spectacular Governor. Sundance’s backing him ‘cuz he’s--soooo electable.'' The Democrats want a mandatory 100 year retirement--he thought he had the right to retire at 45.
“ “Sam’s Republican?” Celeste asked, suprized.
“Kerry laughed. “The Governor has to be a Republican.” It actually depends on how much Sundance or Stateline want to stake him for.”
“Ok--What if some hyper-Republican guy got in, a neo-nazi--Hitler was elected after all. He turns our Zion into Mordor. and lives for a thousand years. What if a Hitler had found the fountain of youth. He could live the Nazi dream, finish the job. Everyone would look exactly the same, think the same--that was Satan’s plan.”
Chapter
Alpine was mostly democrats. The Mayor of Alpine was the Harvest King--he was like Bishop of the Village.
‘The Hughes Bioneers had organized the San Francisco cobference. They wanted to show off their their faery glamoUr youth. ‘The Goth said Uncle Sam thought people ought not to tamper with the Fountain of Life.
“But he’sa taking it anyway,” Klary said. “I’d like to be 300, but if the Government isn’t paying it does take money.”
“We could get rich.” Celeste proposed.
“Yea, Clara said, if we stopped having babies.” She rubbed her big belly protectively. “I’m not off to a very good start.”
‘Yep,’’ the Goth said. “Alot of people are, you know, on the youth juice and you wouldn’t believe who. The Bioneers say old age is no more God’s creation than Small Pox.
“So they’re going to duke it out at this conference. “ Clary said, admiring Livvy’s ballet feet.
‘’It’s all your Aunt Kathleen’s fault, that’s what your Grndma Linda says,’’ Karina said.”
“I thought she was dead,” Clary with the purple hair said, looking up from her physiology book.”
Karina smiled. “You’d think so wouldn’t you. I’d kill her myself but you can’t keep the old girl down.”
“Hunny, it ain’t going to do no good for us to descend to her level.
Livvy was Sam’s up and comer. Her Grandma Linda said her sister Kathleen didn’t respect Uncle Sam during Nam so she didn’t prosper in the land and got sick instead.
‘’Foget her,”she’s just superstitious.
“He more likely gave it to her,” it came from Nam and before that from the Japanese in WWII. They just can’t do much for the ones who were born with it.
Grandma Linda said Kathleen argued about Viet Nam. Thatwas a sin.
Once Kathleen made Great Grandma cry and almost run off the road. She could have killed them all.”
Kerry growled something inaudible. “How did it happen,” he asked, a wonder of civility. Sam was driving the car with his family, behind them. Kathleen had said that just because you were born in a country didn’t mean it was always right.
‘’ Cheeky” the Goth said, he went on “Uncle Samuel’s worried about the Weinmar effect.’’ The Goth said.
‘’In a weak democracy people forget what good government protects us from. The civilian government gets weak. The military’s weak too, big money takes over. The highest bidder takes all.”
“What if a bot got in?” Celeste asked. She was curious about bots and wanted to major in them in college. The Constitution doesn’t say anything about bots because no one imagined there could be any.”
The eyes in Livvy’s tow head stared pleadingly at her brother, like a dog struggling to vocalize . ‘’Big words,’’ she complained, sleepily. “Too big.’’
‘’Well the Constiution guarantees Free Agency. You know what that is?’’ Kerry asked.
“Like Jesus.” Livvy said.
“Well there was a man, Hitler, he was like Satan--he thought he could fix the planet up--just one religion and one kind of person on the whole earth and just one master of the just one master race . He carried a whip everywhere he went and killed all the jews and gypsies and gay people and even J-Dubs.’’
‘’Sounds like Lenin.’’
“Seig Heil.” Clary said. “Sounds like a can of worms.”
“It does seem that bots must have some rights,” Karina said, “depending on how developed they are.”
She went to grab some warm cookies singing;
‘’Imagine one religion,
it’s easy if you try,
one earth below us,
above us only sky.
‘’You mean Stalin.’’ Klary said. Stalin took refugees and anyone who didn’t tow the party line and made them slaves. More people died than under Hitler.”
‘’They didn’t keep Church and State seperate.’’ Celeste reflected. ‘’Hitler’s Court Priests cooked up their own religion they wanted everybody to follow.
“Maybe I’d vote for Lenin,” the Goth said.
‘’It would be like if I hated everybody who was polig because they were old fashioned and tried to kill them all ‘’It’d be like I got embarrassed and murder all of SLC and Provo, even Alpine. . . all the modernist Mormons because of the way they stare at my family.“
“I look Chinese, Kerry said, So sometimes I just stay at the monestary--I can study what I want and if I want a lesson, or to ask a question that’s cool. Grammy Annie’s afraid I’m going to go Catholic on her.‘’
“I survived the nuns--it’s better thanspending half the day on the bus.” Karina said.
‘’Hitler exterminated even kids and babies and Mommies, he was like Boggs, some times I have nightmares about Boggs.’’ Livvy said.
‘’Nits make lice, thats what they said at Haun’s Mill.’’ the Goth said. ’’My friend’s Dad is from California. He pissed on Boggs’ grave.’’
Karina asked if anyone knew why’d he’d wan’t to.
‘’Had to go?’’ asked Rigel, who smelled the cookies, escaped his toddler bed and was standing at the door with his blanket and binky.
The Goth laughed,‘’Oh he had to go alright, had a powerfull need to exercise his Freedom of Expression. ‘’
’’Boggs, he kilt kids and babies and hurt women.’’ ‘Livvy said. “We’re studying it in Mummy’s Sunday School.’’
‘’Boggs signed the extermination act of 1838 and Brother Tomas wants me to give a presentation about it for the Monks, and then some of the Monks will talk about the persecutions in China.’’
Karinna felt a pang of homesickness. An evening tale for the big wild garden that stretched between convent and monastery.
“Down at Annie’s we’re getting some frisky young Monks with loose habits. Annie doesn’t want me around them so much so she sent me up here so I could get Clara pregnant--she hates to see a girl in a bind like that.’’
Celeste asked. “What kind of habits?’’
‘’They had to swim from China to Taiwan, by the time they got to Taiwan their habits were not only loode, they had none at all.” The Goth teased. You can squeak by being gay in American Orders, but in China, being gay isn’t safe. Someone met them on Taiwan with blankets.
“Annie wanted me back up here because, see, we can’t find the baby’s father.”
“He’s the one in Vegas.” Karina said, worried.
“That’s just the last place we can think of to look.”
“Uncle Sam wants me to presentat for his anti-terrorist work-group. Gotta sign some paper to do it. Dad says I’m too young to sign anything and to just give Sam a written copy.”
‘’They want to talk to some of the Andrus cousins from up to Idaho way about why they ran to Vegas and if they know him. They’ll never find them. So we’re going undercover.
We got some dead cousins buried up North and the ones who ran.
Sam thinks knows something about it. They’ve got neo-nazi’s in Vegas. We don’t think the babies father went with them. But boy, they can scare a kid into doing just about anything‘’ Neither of our cousins were religious. Kilt them anyway. Like Hitler and the Jews, it wasn’t religious Jews Hitler killed first.
When he looked at someone and didn’t know whether they were Jewish or not he didn’t know how to do them. So he made’m yellow stars to wear.
“We had a cousin who almost got killed so he ran away to Aunt Kathleen’s. Karina said. His Ma had a real good job in a hospital but didn’t want him down to Vegas or back up her way. Eugene was just as bad, as it turned out.’’
“Was he with her when she lost,” Kerry shrugged, everything--her Cedarwood Yurt, everything. Dad said he didn’t even want to say anything about Linda’s mother around Ginny, or even Aunt Kathleen. It’s like if your Mom burned down your house.”
“You mean Great Grandma--but she was Kathleen’s mother. Sometimes I think family doesn’t last forever, it takes more than the Temple. It takes loyalty from the beginning to the end and beyond”
“Things happen, like Aunt Kathleen and her Mother. It gets broke and then its like Humpty Dumpty and all the King’s horses and all the Kings men.” Livvy said.
“Grandma Linda said all Aunt Kathleen’s radiation problems and our cousins who got killed was because they were worldly.”
“Uncle Brett was worldly and was fun anyway. He understood how Sam was. They’d lay around on the livingroom carpet reading comic books all day and if Sam didn’t want to say anything it was fine with Brett so he taught him about his IBM computer. Barry wouldn’t leave Kathleen, she was too sick.’’
“Linda said that that was worse than murder. Brett staying with her. Linda wanted her kids to forget they’d ever known Kathleen, wouldn’t give them her presents.”
“How?” Celeste asked, she couldn’t make Barry marry her.”
“For not leaving Barry.” Klary said.
“And go where, and how? ” Klary asked.
“She could have left Barry and lived with Grandma Linda—a marriage made in Hell.” Rigel toddled to his Ma, crawled onto her lap and she gave him a cookie
and opened her blouse.
“Daddy said that when Laura got married Kathleen didn’t have any kids so she toook care of Bruce and Sam.” Karina said “For time outs they laid down on the carpet and stuck up their legs so she could drag them into their rooms. Then they screamed and pounded on the door until they were finished and after awhile it all started over again. Ten minutes of good behavior was an acheivement. It’s silly to think they wouldn’t remember.”
“Our Daddy was bad? Celeste said in mock amazement. Livvy wanted to scream. The Family Council was a mess. Bruce was breaking a rule and nobody was talking about it. They always, always sang the Circle Game Song on Sammy and Daddy Bruce’s birthday every year since Aunt Kathleen got sick. Great Grandma like when Grandma said they should remember Kathleen like she was not how she was. Like she was dead.”
They hadn’t ever met her until they were in high school. Grammy reminded Daddy of that all the time.”
The meeting did run down more neatly like a drum banging bunny with its bunny run down.
The problem was the important grant that had payed for Bruce's tuition for some big conference in SF, what Bruce still called Sin City.
Kerry, called generally, the Goth told his big sister she should go to bed. He'd try to prevent violence. After they finished stuffing their Daddy’s can, toilet papering a tree, he threw a kingsised quilt over a cried out Livvy and a sympathetic Celeste, covering both cat and rat, grey to the point of being bluish.
The socialised blue rat poked out her nose out and shook the blanket off her head as the cat began to purr quisically. The heads of the old, and the heavier heads of the young coiled many dreams. Their socialised blue rat went to her wicker basket lined with torn up rags and closed her beady eyes.
Grampy Le'baron's father had joined his Chinese family in Mexico after the railroads were built, bought, payed for and he had found enough jade, going through the Sierra's, to buy and outfit the ranch. Then he brought his wives from China. He was Mormon by then.
Bruce's time and diplomacy put food on the table. He sometimes left patience at the door, like muddy shoes in the Winter. Six days shalt thou be Mr. Nice guy, Karina's father occasionally said, and on the Seventh raise holy hell. But Karina loved her Dad and he wasn’t so bad, even on the Seventh Day.
CHAPTER
Daddy Bruce Bunny presumed himself dead and didn't know how he felt about it. He felt himself an inadequate father, he who brought the Melchesedic Priesthood into his disinterested family, snoring before the blaring TV when he was home and not working on some two bit project.
Any child who turned the TV either up or down learned the meaning of the axiom “Let sleeping dragons lie.” Sometimes Bruce was good. He read or scribbled in the margins of the New Adventures of Alice in Wonderland which he had just renamed the Lobster Quadrille.
Bruce got two for one credits for his time working with the children on the Lobster Quadrille--a roadshow wanting to be an operetta.
Thebig kids liked to work on their Daddy’s version of Clue. They used it to work on real cases. Death with poison in the kitchen, Aunt Kathleen’s oxidised Winterrose in Grammy Linda’s tea. Or perhaps the Colonel with a knife in the study?
Bruce only told Grammy LeBaron about his visits from Alaya. Bruce hoped to the logic book Carrol had outlined before he died would bring in more money for the kids ghost detectors.
Carrol had had left behind a trail of bread crumbs. These argued whether they were on the trail or not. He wanted to translate the Grimm Brothers into Arabic.
Poor Hansel and Gretel. They had gathered no mushrooms or herbs that day, sobbing, they would surely get licked if they returned with just the wrong ones.
Aunt Kathleen had a poem like that. Hansel and Gretal pickied platitues instead-- taking care, for these too are not all good.
Karinna turned on her Mini Mac and cut more time for her BYU paper: Reversing Desertification. The Harmony Shrink gave her a callback andwas more interested in how Karina was doing than about her paper. True, their rug rats had been made and carried out big plans, troubling plans, to prevent their Daddy's birthday escape. Cars could be stuffed and unstuffed, TP hosed fom trees, but hearts required much more time.
Chapter
Daddy Bruce Bunny’s employers felt it vital for there to be a Mormon showing at such exclusive affairs as Bruce would face on his birthday morning.
Even Livvy said Great Uncle Sam was a good person to have at the conference if it was about whether it was OK for Uncle Sam to never get old again.
Mommy didn’t want to have no more babies with Daddy because of NTS like Alaya, or their brother Timothy who had died of lukemia that hurted bad when Daddy could just get seed from Caleb instead. Daddy had been late, late, late, late, for a very important date. They knew because it was lfirst light when he left--Uncle Sam was alway late, fashionably late, but late and Daddy didn’t like being late ever at all.
Across the street their Seed-Daddy had a girlfriend who had a little girl they played dress up with loke a doll. Klary liked to sew for her since her Ma couldn’t sew. She was born between Livvy and Rigel. They went with their Seed Poppy on Winter Solstice when the Red Man popped out on Cerredwyn’s Cauldron. Where the presents were.
They danced the spiral dance on Breed, holding their candles. Celeste would wear the candle crown next spring. Their bio-daddy stood in the circle when Rigel was blessed.
Alaya would be alive and pretty if he had been her Daddy. Their brother would look like Calab and never get Luikemia. If they had got the seed from their biodaddy he wouldn’t have screamed and screamed in pain from the Luekemia.
The Luikemia wouldn’t have caught him, It was a secret about the turkey baster. If anyone found out, Bruce could go to jail. It was illegal to make a baby yourself. It had to be like Aalya and Timmy because those were the only bodies left for them. Daddy didn’t believe that there was a fixed number of bodies and after that all the babies had to be sick or die. Caleb didn’t believe it. He said that just when the sky was bright blue and the stars were coming out God cried one great tear into the sea for Ephroim, suffering children--birds whose nests were on the ground.
The last thing Daddy Bruce Bunny cremembered before he drifted off was the distorted voices of the children’s meeting rising with warm stove air up the stairs.
Alarmed, he found himself suddenly underwater . By the march of minutes, and the golden bubbles that rose to the aqua surface when he breathed or tried to speak, he had to presume that he was dying Aunt Kathleen, his mother’s’s sister, wafted toward him, a mermaid swimming toward him through sunsplashed pools.
Guilt hit Bruce hard. He was a father with responsibilities. He had craved releif from the long Church corridors of pain and power. His prayers never got answered. He hadn’t expected to join his Aunt so soon.
What about the Lobster Quadrille? Harvest home? He supposed someone would stand in for him.
Chapter
'The river Jorden is chilly and cold, it chills the body not the soul.'' Strings of bubbles rose vigorously to the surface as he sang.
The Jordan River Crossing where the kid’s parked, where he and Karina parked in their dsy, sleepy, he must not have jagged left to the bridge and had skidded into the wide river instead.
Tonight, with or without him, just at sunset, the Earth would turn--dragonflies and bats would zip about, teens and tweens, his among the others, would converge to disscuss his tragic demise, there to comfort Klary and Celeste, bruskly mumbling condolences to Kerry, and his Livvy, his poor little Livvy at home. Rigel would Caleb be the only Daddy he would remember?
A parental car light would flash, turning onto the river road, then another, coming to retreive a missing tween. The scene would feed out to its tawdry conclusion, cellular ''Mo-o-o-ms, not yet, did you know that Klary and Celeste’s Daddy didn’t call in at dinner?'' Thry are very scared about it.”
’Bruce sang, '
‘’Bye-bye mis American Pie,
Took the Chevy to the levee
but the levee was dry,
Good old boys were drinkin'
whiskey and rye, singin’
'This'll be the day that I die,
This'll be the day that I die.''
Karina's Klary, feeling herself an old maid at 17, could usually be found tat the Jordan Bridge with her boy of an evening. Coming home late one morning from SLCI in the wee smalls, Bruce had glimpsed Klary's boy's car down to the river bridge. It was 3am for heck’s sake.
They had had a true falling out--the only one, ever since Karina had presented him with her pretty 4 year old, ah, he remembered. He recognized her ladd as a certified member of the Future Poligs of America. He was favored by Klary’s Grammy Le Baron, a good sign. She held him up as a model for his horsemanship, endurence, thoughrouness.
She liked it that he left everything tidy after he and Klary went riding--all stalls cleaned and horses curried. He knew the way to a Ranch woman’s heart.
He was smart enough to go to a good college.
He never pressed Klary to take on one of the spirits that wafted down the river breeze before her time, but one thing could lead to another, as it alwsys had. They had never burned a girl ay the stake as his memory--not in their families in her reconing.
There was endless fuss about STDs these days. They’d lost 20 percent of Klary’s generation. The Relief Society's quilt was now often from D.I. everyone was too sad to sit and quilt a quilt for a baby who would likely take it as their shoud. It had been made by some Relief Society frame by a ward relief Society in the happier days of the past.
There was a horror of Gentile Doctos who argued for amniocentesis and routinely sucked the deformed and dysplasic down wind babies out with a vacuum pipette.
Karinna used Ida, the polig Granny who was married to the children’s geneticist. The poligs were the hardest hit by the Nuclear Testing, and the childrens births were classified as they drew in their first breaths. Then she haad endless AEC paperwork to do, but she didn’t mind, she thought a mother, or in this case possibly two, who labored together, sqeezing hands, deserved their privacy.
The downwind babies often died in the first 48 hours, and her husband gained the needed magic key to examine the child and do the needed examination and tissue and DNA sampling. Ida took the baby to the coroner herself, and attended the furneral, the baby so small it could fit in man’s big shoebox,stapled with white satin.
The Airport youth clinic did not approve of home pregnancy checks. They wanted no ugly scenes, no repeat pregnancies. Karina claimed that the only effective remedy for teen pregnancy was to hose the darn kids down at 10 o’clock.
Death, like life, was irony. Bruce’d watched the river road and thought to finagle yellow rubber bumpers jigging to the right just when they needed to jagg left to bump across the bridge. Folks said the bumpers would ruin the view and even got up a meeting against it, but their bridge, the turnoout where Klary had been conceived was far under the surface now.
The road veered so it was easy to mistake the muddy turn out for a puddle in the road . An accident waiting to happen An icy dousing in the Jordan, ought to be memorable. Had Bruce forgotten?
After the meeting in the haunted nursery Karinna drove to her mother’s for an extra supper of steaming home made bread spread with home made Matheson raspberry jam and fresh churned butter--weedy tepid milk tasting of each cow individually.
Karina studied for her exam while her big family wandered in and out of the kitchen and pantry, snacking, whispering, reading, studying for an exam, scolding.
Chapter
Bruce roused momentarily. In Alpine, Bruce’s body slept, out cold, not too asleep to feel the curled body of his such-a-sweet-spirited wife curled against his back. It was an asset in his line of work, a fashionable, sweet spirited wife, and a package deal—complete with High connections.
Karina had came home late and gone on studying on her night computer. Bruce woke early and crept out of bed. He folded the camera tripod. The camera had taken a shot every twenty minutes, freezing the incandescence of each incandesent footsie Bunny honey moment for his feedster blog. The personal touch. Rigil had crawled into the big bed when he heard his mommy’s car.
Karinna put an engorged teat into his mouth as milk arced out of the other one. The ballyhoo from Livvy rose to such a swell that the older children began to slide down the fireman’s pole from the divided dormer.
“Eh, what time is it?” Klary asked Bruce “Eh . . . time to be up Doc and going’’ Bruce answered.
‘But he thought not quite yet and yawned--I-I-I think I’ll-l-l go back to sleep ‘till things settle down, Bruce threw himself belly downward onto the big bed.
Rigel and Livvy jumped on his back and bounced. “’You aren’t going to be gone for ages and ages, remember, you promised.” Livvy demanded.
“Actually,” Bruce said, ‘’I am poorly informed.” Into his step-daughter’s Bunny ear he mumbled, “It’s only three-thirty, lets all get some sleep.”
He had hoped for a private, now ruined, teta-tete with Mommy Bunny in the haunted nursery--Celeste and Klary had left their books spead around the unmade bed so it wouldn’t have been acvailable anyway.
Uncle Sam and great Uncle Samuel would just be meeting at Hill AFB to put some miles on a factory fresh 4th generation prototype of Samuel’s idiot proof plane. Sammy being the idiot--better Sammy than him.
Uncle Sam gloried in predawn pitch black turbulence, the sparrowheads and cumulous clouds, the pastels as the sun came up over the Sierra Nevada’s, where he liked to take his sister aher granchildren or their families, or just land and lean against a tree for f a long talk with his neice Kathleen. He could project himself and surroundings into her bedroom as the sun rose--easing her Cabin fever.
S.F. had always seemed to him the shining city of Oz. If they got bilious in a complicated storm syatem they could always go up and up and up--the lead aerobatist usually took thst role, his wingmen arching to the sides. Hard to think of the big, clumsy Gooney birds in which his brother in law, Kathleen and Linda et. al’s demented Father, had once braved the Himalian hump.
Lizzy was still trying to reason with her snoring male Elder in Zion. The tykes had put it to a vote at a family meeting. The voting was unaminous. Daddy’s birthday trip was against the rules.
The proposition of Daddy’s not going on any more trips had failed to pass, but that he should be barred from trips on his birthday was unanimous. Daddy was going anyway.
The varmints had taken their Dad’s failure of their family democracy hard, Daddy smoozing around with Great Uncle Sam on his birthday just wasn’t right.
Bruce putting on his black tie $1,000, costume with thec $300.00 shoes and waltzing out the door after tricking them into falling back to sleep, just was wrong.
That was a rule. When it was a clear matter of right and wrong there was no voting. Any vague proposition requiring discussion required a vote. But Daddy going off for a birthday bash on his birthday was wrong Livvy was sure of it.It was all their birthdays.
So Rigel and Livvy pounded some more, untill they too fell asleep. Mommy brought her night computer and worked on her paper for the Y.
*
Chapter
Bruce got into his old green car which he’d had since Aunt Kathleen stayed with them as often as she could get time off college.
The big commutter mail mushroom suited his tastes, and generally favored the childrens’ mental health, normally they could have breakfast with him before Daddy left. Bruce would arrive in Sin City this morning late, but no more than fashionably late, a disgruntled bunny, but these things seldom started on time.
Uncle Sam was to make his entrance flanked by his Nephews. His Uncle Samuel enjoyed late entrances, the sudden hush and startled murmer at his general anononymity, the extent of his fruit salad, the patch of medals on his white dress uniform. Most of all only a few knew who, it was wondered, was the Ancient Mariner of the skies? Those who knew were pleased to be at a gathering at which Sam might attend. He looked so well for his age.
More than one, a physician, wanted to rip off Uncle Sam’s clothes and maybe start taking blood and taking other bodily fluids for examination.
Yes, it went in their favor how well he did look, theire was talk of a bid for President. He would have run long since without the difficulties about Nellis. There were primates, long term study animals, in the basement of Nellis, that was sinister enough. And, like the Kuru study, slow microbes required long patience for the disease to satisfy the deamon Koch’s postulates. Koch was sacred.
They had known so little about the liguistic and artistic abilities, the emotional needs of primates when they first injected them with microbes collocted from the Pacific. They knew so much more now.
Rather allow the public to beleive they were keeping aliens down there than admit the tawdry, fetid truth. Aunt Kathleen--she was born at the witching hour of the Nazi Paperclippers’ 1952 Delta/Dog shot. She had had to spend more tha half her life in bed, living the life of a firefly in a jar. She understood the situation and tried to endure.
Though Uncle Samuel was nearing 80, he had once been enfeebled at 60. Then Kathleen’s bothersome friend Ginny called. Said the Leavenworth Project had an age reverting cocktail they wanted him to try.
Picking his ex-wife’s cats off his supine body as Ginny said ‘You may name it,‘ Sam hemmed and hawed, Uh, how about ‘Ponce de Leon.’
Bruce and his brother were taking the Cocktail as was Karina. A large scale trial was planned in China--participants would have to agree to have no children.
There were to be other trials, offered without restraint to victims of severe ethnic cleansing.
Bruce and Sam had no particular qualifications. Was it possible that the old coot would miss them?
The brothers were over 4o now and so the same age for three months a year. By tradition, they had their party on Bruce’s Birthday and it was always a BIG DEAL. Bruce put together all the parties. Uncle Sammy was too shy to put together a decent party.
Thier party had become their annual ride on the Carosel. Kathleen’s idea, just before her Encephalopathy made travel and singing and joy and play almost impossible. Thier mommy Linda said Aunt Kathleen wasn’t sick at all, just lazy--she knew.
The boys were not small children anymore. They were rebellious and insistant. Aunt Kathleen had sung a Buffy Saint Marie song on a tape---actually a few years before their mother froze Kathleen out. Before Kathleen burned a thousand other bridges about which her mother would not speak in the interest of staying positive.
The song was about a Carosel, and Sam, who knew a disconcerting number of songs had only to sing them once to know the words and Bruce, Sam’s little brother made up the piano and sang. They had to do all the decorations, bake the cake, send out the invitations, collect the RSVP’s, do the dishes and take down the decorations themselves. Or, they could sing ‘Happy Birthday.
This they did, which made their mommy mad. She just didn’t want to have their party, their way. Dauntless, they rose together and sang--
‘Yesterday a child was full of wonder, caught a dragonfly inside a jar . . .
Kathleen, Bruce remembered had put a jar of Mt. Whitman fireflies in his room once--the summer she took his green car into the desert to work and brought the fireflies back.
Their mother said it was Kathleen’s pathetic idea to sing the Circle game for thier birthday. It was a song Kathleen had taught him when he was little, sitting him on her lap and watching the little lights in the gloomy jar.
In the letter she sent she said she was sorry she couldn’t come and sing it herself, but she was ill, and they miht have to visit her for awhile.
Her mother’s distense from her ill sister made nonsense of her continual preaching about the importance of ‘’their’’ family--what about Mommy Linda’s family? What if one of them got sick--what were the bridges Aunt Kathy had burned, would they burn their’s too or go on taking care of one another Mommy Linda said that Aunt Kathleen had been dead to her years and years ago.
That had been Linda’s hubris, Dragon’s underbelly. That it had been impossible for her to keep her sister comfortable and near the family in her last years. According to his mother, her sister Kathleen had been burning their bridges for a long time. He could see how impossible gathering the scattered of their crossroad ashes would be.
Kathleeen, Linda said, would never change. They were to stay away from her. Hate wasn’t a major Mormon trait, it must have come from the long dead Great Grandfmother’s Irish side.
Mormons turned their ancient hatred inward, against poligs, sci-fi geeks, Chinese and against Gentile athletes and against cyberpeople.
CHAPTER
Bruce’s ancestors had been burned out by the Utes and had really learned how to turn the other cheek.indian Law was an eye for an eye, a life for q life, a child for a child. The victim decided what the punishment would be, but the leader decided what the crime had been and who had commited it.
Linda said her her sister Kathleen had been burning bridges going way back. Her mother wouldn’t answer any questions about it. Uncle Sam didn’t know either. That was one reason Bruce went back to Florida to have a long talk with Kathleen, but Kathleen had been trying to find out for 35 years and failed.
Her best guess was that Linda beleived Kathleen was infested with evil spirits and would contaminate her neice and nephews if allowed to stay so close to them.
Aunt Kathleen watched Ladd play with what looked like a pet eel.“Maybe,” she said “Maybe that’s why I felt I needed to go with Barry. We were together for six years. I don’t think Linda would have kept me after that.
Linda wanted them to say they had never met Lindas sister but once, when he was in highschool. His brother and sisters had been taken for a overnight visit at her Aunt Kathleen’s worker’s big house and met his wife and baby because Linda, did not anyone to say that she had a sister her children had never even met. Crimeny. Criminey Pete.
It was partly about their birthdays. ‘’What’s wrong with being conventional? Linda would began, “Why did her sister always have to do the opposite of what everybody else did. Linda liked singing Happy Birthday, and she liked making fancy cakes with a different fancy theme every year.
They lived in a teensy town where every sentence began with “Have you heard that . . .?” Everyone had heard everything and everyone had an opinion about what they had heard,
It said in the new testement that if you go to the altar with your offering, and remember that you have anything against your brother, you should go and make peace with your brother and thn return to the altar and make your offering.
Nonetheless, from the first year they sang, while Bruce playing it on the piano:
‘’And the seasons they go round and round, and the painted ponies go up and down-- we’re captive on a carosel of time. We can’t return we can only go around from where we came--
and go round and round in the circle game . . .
Chapter
Livvy and Rigel gave up. Bruce returned to his dream. If dead, his life was not flashing before his eyes. Hues of blue loti bled inward through Bruce's eyelids, negotiating his clarion vitreous humor, cavorting about his rosey malar disk.
''Qual asules d'los cielos en la madrudgadra'’ a voice trilled, a girl’s voice. sweet as the dark, morning singing of the bats in the walls of his old house. Too bad the Scouts ghost detection project was in the nursery.
Bruce shifted toward the voice, Daddy Bruce pondered. Was this day, the first day of the rest of his life? Did a promising future still await? No, perhaps not. Today, no one would press some personal agenda to pass Bruce a bug to insert in the ear of his centenarianal employer.
No treadmill test at SLCI would he be forced to endure in the gloom.
Co-pilots, they wanted to phase out the dratted copilotsfor a cheaper machine. If he missed his test, he could but on his Federal Air Marshall’s costume in case there was a repetition tOF 2002’s 911, 40 years before.
From SCLI’s perspective, the auto-pilos excelled. They didn’t need to sleep, converse, lead the pilot into a life of sin. They just ordered them without vaginas.
Bruce, a chronic treadmill evador, accrued demerits for slackness, lost treadmill time and family plan demerits for tardiness. Gracias del’Dios that he only flew where he was going, moonlighting.
His duty was to find and report back to the his boss, whom he and the kids called the Prez on the intricacies of the modern world. The Prez required a younger man who could see past and future and render them articulatly.
The Prez and his reclusive Army Buddy had a particular interest in medical ethics. He felt for Karinna’s shyness about her spoiled marriage and the sweet, illegitimate daughter who had spent her life attempting perfection. She strugged either to make up for her mother’s mistake, or repeat them with absolute pricision, her mother and grandmother could never decide.
Bruce followed orders with perfect imprecision. The Prez gave them with practiced verve. He spent the WWII Veteran of the Office of War Information serving under Archie MacLeish. He knew what it meant to do 60 years hard time hunched over his typewriter, a life sentence he passed to his young confidant.
He chose those around him like Lear, or Julius Cesar, with care. He was Machiavelli’s aged Prince. He had slept with the book beneath his pillow. His most trusted confident was a certain, rich, notorious clown--an old king he was and must have his Puck. The Genome/Ponce de Leon project was a biotechnical Trojan Horse.
His head in the sand, a posture maintained through the Trumam Admistration, the Prez had afterward worked for Eisenhower. The Prez now detested the propogandist’s Genre, which had devolved into a vortex after the Second War and had since become universally detested.
During Bush every word spun Every sentence of blather burgeoned, pregnant with nuance, connotation, value, implication, in-authenticity. Self expression was no longer sincerity, authenticity-- human speech had lost its right purpose.
The Prez, having lived his life tilting with words, revered them with awe. His was an apprentice’s faith. Bruce’s Church was not his—the Church of the Heavenly Fly, he was stung by this during his first mission in Egypt and was showing signs of the disease before he marrried his Karina--to every passa en la Vida he could but say as thou willest to a preposturous and Omniscient Almighty, echoing back was the Wolf of the Steppes, the laughter of Don Giovanni, Satre’s nausea at his deity’s creatura.
Chapter--The Athlete
The Prez had once garnered the doom of writing endless tweeked war stories to bolster the saints patriotism. Words inferior to those Bruce embellished and offered up to the credulous and unwary. Creative stories for those fated to Patton’s Hell. The Prez feigned past courage reluctantly, never putting aside the bitter remembrance of the enemies of his people, those he had been fated to lead even to need.
[Dean Evans}
CHAPTER
The Prez enjoyed Tuesday night poker had a good poker from time to time. and he always had an ace in the whole. He returned love for impartiality, but malice for malice-. The Lord he liked to say, was impartial as a tree--accepting rain, and sun, day and night evenly. The winds might sway it. Hate wasn’t generally a Mormon trait. His Anders ancestors had lived under Indian law. Managed none the less to turn the other cheek.
Better to feed than fight, so Brigham had said. So Bruce humbly fed his Church Blogg at Feedster with all the Tuesday Night Sundandce/Stateline must turd the Prez and Spruce Goose passed to him.
Penitence was the work of ancient soldiers Marching as to war, with the Cross of Jesus ... so the Prez had determined that it was time to lay off the organic Shirley Temples and do as they had promised to do, as he and the Spruce Goose had sworn to do as they packed their bags while leaving Nueremberg. They would seek aggressively the Fountain of Youth. Eliminate suffering in God’s firmament, where something, one must admit had gone hideously wrong.
They’d buried their resolve in in the backyard, like pet dogs. They knew where the bones were buried. They concocted the Spruce Goose’s cosmic joke. His Human Genome Project.
Complexity was not among Mommy Linda’s miems, she likely knew more about the ward gossip than the news. They didn’t get TV on the other side of the Kennecott Promatory. That was how Bruce grew up. He watched it at his friends’ houses.
He read, put History together on his own. The Handcart companies were evacuated from Europe in 1857. Bruce’s German Great, Great, Great Grandfather had fled Baden-Baden as a Catholic. In the same year. Brigham Young had evacuated his saint the year before waves of revolution swept over Western Europe.
These might have as well have been Bruce’s desperate Handcart Danish kin. Their last glimpse of their village--the one they had known along the rosary of time--progenitors to a 15th Century Dane named Madoc d’au. Torchlight twinkled in their tears as they looked for the last time at home, their Lovely land.
Their people were tolerant, having suffered, exercised in the turning of the other cheek.
‘’You who, Jesus,’’ Bruce called in his sleep, startling Karinna who had her knees up, collating data on her night computer. She had a final in the morning, and had to teach in the afternoon. Karina plied her domicillary diplomacy by day and through Bruce?s dream nights, where the White Rabbit barked anxious orders in his sleep. There he bemoaned his fate, recited Puck the fairies lines from the Midnight Summer’s dream. He chided Alice, their eldest girl Celeste for chasing tacyons until it was velvet black all around.
CHAPTER--
Why Aunt Kathleen was Sick
One of the most important commandments Mommy Linda said was ‘’Honor thy Mother and thy Father that thy days may be long upon the land the Lord thy God has given thee.’’ Kathleen hadn’t prospered cuz she’d gone off with Barry. Their mother was proud of her viperous superiority toward the unrighteous. Their Aunt suffered.
No one, least of all Linda, could call Kathleen righteous or penitant. The night Aunt Kathleen brought Bruce the fireflies and sang, holding him, Linda and Kathleen had had a fight in the kitchen. Then Kathleen walked down the front steps for the last time. She hurt them and she, Mommy Linda assured Bruce, could come back anytime she wanted.
Kathleen knew the Commandment. She always got funny ideas about what scriptures meant. Kathleen said it meant something like, “Honor thy parents and, seeing, your children will tenderly care for their elders and enjoy longevity.
The Prez met Death and held his position King of the Hill as a combatent. He knew so many men whose minds were vast as the Louvre. Archival brains they had, as vast as those torched at Alexandria, Mayan and Incan archives.
An interregnium could be traitorous, as when Esra Taft Benson, in his ascendancy, ordered a Deseret Books’ Church History--a million dollars in newly minted books, destroyed. So the Arrignton Era in Church History fell like a great tree. Still, they disobeyed.
This was after the relaxed reign of the Rightly Beloved President Kimball, Bensen, whose fanatiscism the Prez had had abhored under Eisenhower, disliked Benson’s usurpation of the Tabernacle Podium, his stumping for the American Independent Party, the John Birch Society.
Giving political speeches to the Tele-communications union. Having once worked to mute Benson’s embittering reign the Prez feared to die, there being wolves in the place of shepards to lead his peculiar people into the Kingdom as they indeed got more and more peculiar.
The Prez was a journeyman DOD reporter during McCarthy’s reign of political terror. He had worked with Roosevelt and not favored the policies of Truman.
The Prez feared the darkest lessons of History--Nazi book burnings, the Chinese who stuffed their matresses with ancient Tibetan manuscripts. History was a beetle clambering up a sand dune, rolling back down, making small progress.
It was the Church President Prophet Seer and Revelator’s Personal Secretary’s Hell to manage the Salt Lake rumor mill. Ah, Bruce bubbled, Death was sweet. Did he even want jackels cackling at his fragile hive of power as avaricious men sought power as their spoil. Would the Prez continue with the anti aging protocol without Bruce to badger him?
A wretched end, Daddy Bruce Bunny bodily strapped into the Green Car he, his Dad and brother rebuilt together when the boys were in High School.
Aunt Taffy ‘n Bruce’s Green Car.
‘’The Jorden River is chilly and cold,’’ Bruce sang, ‘
’Chills the body but not the soul. ‘’
Stillwell, the Prez said, required his writers to keep two accounts of history--one absolutely accurate and the other, just what the people wanted to hear.
Bruce tired of the Terrestrial sphere. Past time to get out of Dodge. The conspiracy theorists would be busy with his dissapearence for years.
The laminated coach beside the SLCI family services treadmill would be the first to record Bruce’s missed appointment, his lapse of punctuality.
------------- Long insert.
He’d watched that awkward riverbend , thought something should be done to put in a yellow danger bumper just where a car would go off.
Folks said it would ruin the view. The road veered to the left in a way that made it easy for a sleepy commuter to mistake the muddy turn out for a puddle in the road. Next came an icy swim in the Jordan.
Daddy Bruce Bunny presumed himself dead and didn't know how he felt about it, still, dead he appeared to be, adventure before him, an aquatic version of Pilgrims' progress. Time to be reasonable, time to inventory the facts;
A)He found himself to be in the condition that gave Adam the blush. Had he lost his bunny jammies procreating in the haunted nursery? Yes, in righteousness alone Bruce Bunny was robed. Bruce looked at his feet. They were developing fur. Where he wasnt furry he was pruney.
''Litle seed inside the pru-en,'' Bruce recited, ''Wat you see and what you doin'?. Wat you see and what you doin. A treble voice joined him, is it night or is it Noo-en/ Little seed inside the pruen.
The children liked to pull the blankets over their heads while he pulled the blankets back a little at a time. If they didnt come out themselves Karinna’d open the shades and say –”Awake and rejoice, for today is a day that God has made” or to the hot solar disk--”Good morning merry sunshine how are you today.'” Little seed inside the pruen. Don't mind, Daddy, a voice twiitered, very near.
Bruce found himself sightless. enveloped in red tubules. Bruce was held tenderly in place by what looked to be jointed licorice ropes, slimey snorkels, and there did not seem to be any maritime Lilipution with whom he might converse or negotiate,
'Gosh darn it,' Bruce bubbled. 'Take me to your leader, or what ever i say now.' He remembered the dream class they had taken together--some tribe in Malasia had taught the method to a Provo anthropologist--How may I help you?' he asked. Then he had said, worrying if he was alive on the bank of the Jorden, but simply asleep. 'Daddy, we dont need anything in Dream land, but the live people, they need lots of things.'
The long worms felt Bruces face and sholders, while some snapped out to inhale minnows or up to bring back bubbles of what appeared to be atmosphere. a few snorkels took long, long sips of air, Then the tubules retracted to the sides of a head. A dead girls ugly head.
Bruce's heart harkened back to his lost infant Alaya. His sweet dead Alaya, who died still a nursling, never to go with unwholesome boys--how to find her here--he needed to swim to land, to make inquiries. Instead a head emerged from the large and wet red dust mop. While most of the elephantine tubules lost diameter until they were hard as horsehair.
Then Alaya, he was sure it was Alaya, though she was in the body of some extinct Pacadermal water species. Alaya shifted into the infant he remembered, scarcely less odd as she diminished in size and shape shifting into the sweet but deformed baby he remembered, curled into his arms .
She was again the tender baby he had released as she died. The baby let fly a few of her snorkels to pick swamp grass out of his hair and tear them off, then she sucked them with tiny vacuem hoses that seemed covered in myelyn.
It appeared to Bruce that they were in a wide river, or inland sea. The sea snorkling whipsnades,though small, at their ends showed a fine dexterity, like that of the terminus of an elephants trunk.
Elephants usually grazed on fenced-in park land, but there had been 500-600 variations on the theme--some with human- analogus arms and legs. There were tales of elephants swimming island to island feeding voratiously where they landed, survivors of intermediatory species which lay along a epocal evolutionary trail.
A few large and reclusive subspecites might have survived at freshwater river mouths. Now they lived in dreams and Si-fi. Ugly as a stranded infant dugong, had been his Alaya, something off a X-files rerun. He felt some despair still at having to release his baby into a unknown scarcely fitted to empirical adequacy.
Bruce examined the base of alayas coils and the two digits at the snorkeling end of each tubule. 'laya laughed. –No one touches there Daddy, not with fingers, its private.”
She sighed. –My daddy, I am not your Alaya now. I'm belly big and will calf soon. When I calve, all the peoples will sing my new name, the name of the people--Sirenia . After we calve we are all the way sirenia, We name our calves, but adults surrender their names to the people, minds too. I may even forget my daddy because then we sing the thoughts of our people.'
'The men?' Bruce asked.
'We are friends with them sometimes.' Lya said. Bruces mind crowded with possibilities. He was not thinking out of the box--he was out of the box bodily and possibly dead as well.
'The floundered dead sing
no name where kelped reed
shelves line the shore, Deep,
in hoards the sea dead sing
from Froth to froth they
wail and cry, tossed
by fear and lost.'
It sounded like Aunt Kathleen. Bruce and his dowager had been reading her together at bedtime lately, a pity she hadnt had time to finish, and they had so little time.
'I know our Daddy, OURS Daddy,' Lya said 'And Daddy's Aunt Kathleen. I know Rigel, Livvy and CeCe. and my mommy Karina--sometimes mommy cries and sometimes Grammy dies. She didnt ever know Kathleen, but we have such a big family, but only on the polig side. Sometimes your Mommy cries, but only because her sister is dead. If she had been alive she would have put her in a ghetto for sick people.'
''She is like your Aunt Kathleen. The professor says they, Aunt Kathleen too, are atavistic, a chimera, and the professor too. He was the one who helped her when she died. She swam to where he kept spare dreams. He finished your Aunt Kathleen's round house. He helped her when she threw up and he taught her many things.''
Daddy, She is haunting her Yurt and Ladd and Paul want to move it. Where ever, just closer to people she loved. It is pretty as a flower. Professors Philosophers and Poets they were and friends in hundreds of lives. Bad happened to her and Kathleen isnt going back however the professor coaxes her. He even offered to be her mother. When she died he first thing she asked was for me, then Paul, But it will be a long time before he dies. He found the secret Methusala brought from the stars.
He had to swim a long way to bring it here.'
Bruce was an adept at changing this general topic, that of his banished aunt. –Your Daddy named you once. Now A new name for my grown up girl instead of Sirenia. –Millagros? It means miracle and you are my miracle.'
'You named me Alaya.' Alaya charged. vehemenantly.
–You didnt like Alaya?'
'I remember, but my Daddy, first calving is a very happy time, The professor says that all the people go into couvade so the calves come more easily.'
'The landpeoples,'' Laya shuddered, their eyes.They looked at me and said poor Alaya. Bruce stroked his fishy's downy head and Alaya began to purr. Bruce felt despair, rembering his release of his baby girl into what? Fear washed over him and his faith failed him, swallowed in greif. With that came a hatred of which no one spoke. The AEC and NTS, the Manhatten and Nutmeg projects. Isotopic ticking of the Maternal clock. Two of Karina's cousins had born babies the same day, All with similar deformaties.
Alaya's exaggerated congenital facial anomalies seemed more comely underwater. The cleft that had split her to her nose, cleaving her upper palate, was packed with gills. Alaya/Sirenia's, prominent split lips had elongated into a long cocks comb. her upper lips fluttered just back of alaya shoulders as she swam.
There was a swift commotion as the girl, as he supposed, mounted, as he supposed, not the Professor, but her friend. He bolted along the human seawall and then stitched the waves as it/he/she/they took in long draughts of air.
Back underwater, Alaya and Posiden vented the air which noisily bubbled. Their jointed snorkel tubes obscured his view of them. The Human people see us riding our dolphins as pets and think we are dead people.
Sirenia laughed. We are the dolphin's pets, Daddy. And sometimes we are borned as dolphins, but when you are a dolphin, well most of us are young. The young just eat and calve and are never separated from Sirenia. Those who are borned as people, well, they stay part people and some are so people that we are just dreams to them.
''A baby is borned and we sing, even the males and the people think we are people lost from wracked boats into the sea. Someimes, Sirenia said, she and Poseiden would go down deep and would use her air when she vented. Bruce wanted to man handle Alaya backinto his time--but the bill, just for carp alone . . .''
Alaya had grown no hair. Snorkeling quietly now, her tubules retracted into her head in tight coils, fluttering spirals where tiny babies bubbled. The tiny trunks rose to the surface , sipping oxygen. Bruce, ignoring her protests, examined her gravely deformed upper palate. She found gills inside, a cavity for them at the centrum of her srunken coils.
''Are there others like you?'' Bruce asked hesitantly. ''I mean with coils like fingers even Daddies can't touch?'' Sirenia giggled, ''We don't have Daddys in our pod.'' Alaya sported in the water, Then paddled off.
Alaya's underwater world reminded Bruce of swimming at the packed county pool--life everywhere, and bubbles. He thought, he with an industrial time machine, could transport ancient Bonneville fish for profit. He'd float the suggestion at family night.
''We eat only the Little swimmers where the Dolphins say we can graze. Yep, Only where our dolphins say because they know when their gardens need culling. The dolpins like everything to be in balance but the little scuttler with the hurty hands--they eat my hair when I fish here. Poseiden says that's why we have too many... how do you sayin people?
''Well, ...hmmm...''
''I dont know. it seems I am a mere human,
''There is nothing wrong with naming things. You... ''
''Our professor knows latin. We tell him what things do and he looks in his dictionary. The never borned shows him in dreams and then draws pictures and writes down everything he remembers and then if he forgets, the never borned remind him and he names in his big book.He doesn't think that we are real, He says we are interesting and that's enough.
Sirenia and her sullen male swam up tothe surface and raced. then swan leisurly back. ''We got extincted so we borned ourselves with the fishes. We build up our pods, first. The never borned help us. You still be my Daddy and talk to me?''
''Yes, Bruce said, You are my girl.''
''I be. Some of us spoke people for a long time and know where our peoples are, like the Professor and Alaya. He knows languages and teaches me so I can greet the humans --I came from them this time so now I will always know them.''
''You speak well.'' Bruce observed.
''I am grown now Daddy. Sometimes I know how to talk, how to find my Daddy and visit Ladd. Ladd is my friend, he is a sea person. He's my Kathleen's Brother. They play with me and talk to me. Ladd in dreams, but maybe not for always.
I creep around and Kathleen plays with me all day sometimes and with her long river fishes. They are trained to help swimmers and save them from the destroyers with with the long teeth. The big river fish, well he can sting hard. A dolphin comes to fight and bite the big teeth fish--
'Peoples could drowned while the dolphins fougt the big teeth biter--we have to stand back or go to find more dolphins. The river fish are better for this. They just sting the bi teeth hard and the big teeth remember and don't like to come back.'
''I come to visit Celeste and Livvy. They made a picture,of me. I tell you, my Daddy', so you will believe that I talk in their dreams and we are friends. I don't want to be borned as a people ever again, so I keep my family and I make friends with who he
tells me in his dreams.''
''Daddy, now you come to my house and we be friends? I missed you my Daddy. You do not like my Poseidon?''
'I'd hoped to avoid him,'' Bruce said, eyeing the overmuscled, big bisexual male.
''Poseiden is a good swimmer Daddy, and he helps the dolphins when the sharks come. At night we creep, creep and creep and we watch what the people do. We stoled a spear from the humans.''
''Swim to my House Daddy, there are ten in my pod and in Poseiden's there are fifteen. We will have eleven in my pod when I calve.''
''laily, you're too young to go with boys, REALLY, even very brave ones, not to mention cute too. Bruce employed his fingers for the math, ''How old are these people, this Poseindon and this Poseiden--is he...your--Friend?'' Bruce asked scepticly.''
''I will answer because I love you and you are ours Daddy.My Posiden has been born seven times.''
''No more, no less, And you?'' Bruce asked. ''I just remember my friends. I don't study different lives and Earth history like Posiden and the Professor.''
''The Professor,'' Bruce hesitated.''Laily, first, am I dead?'' His adolescent, big bellied daughter regarded him, amused.
''You don't know?'' She asked. Bruce wondered what he had been doing just before he died. Greif would not spare him this query. Karen something. there had been a woman, a mother to Alaya. When human peoples die other people come to help them. You are only dreaming, my Daddy--peoples dream and come here. When they feel better they swim home.''
''I be getting big. Soon I bring my calf to visit Mommy Karina.''
''The Goth draws me when he does art, then he paints over me. The professor can bring you to where we live. And he knows where the other peoples are.''
“How?” Bruce asked dubiously.”
“He finds our bones. We leave lots of bones.”
“Now, my Daddy, this is what we will do.
''In the daytime, You stay at the new house and Live with my CeCe. I will visit my Ladd and my Kathleen. (The professor thinks Ladd and CeCe could be friends.)''
''Who, and what, may I ask, is this Ladd creature.''
''Ladd is just a boy, (cute.)'' Alaya said. ''My Kathleen's brother is Ladd. My Kathleen is like my Daddy's Aunt Kathleen. ''
''I like to play with my Kathleen. We swim. Now, Like me'n my Daddy swimming. Kathy's imaginary friend--that's what Ladd calls me. He pretends to visit with us when we are playing. He can't see me in the light. Then I hide myself, The Professor says he looks like he's seen a ghost if he sees me even for an instant. I'm just my Kathleen's friend. not imaginary at all. You had an Aunt Kathleen. She trailed off . . .My daddy, am I imaginary?''
''You don't know?'' Bruce asked. He answered. ''Invisible, sometimes, I think.''
Sirenia giggled, ''I know lots of things from the invisble. But tell about the future, that can spoil everything.''
''Listen to your professor, Puffin. I'm just visiting. A single snorkel stroked the back of his ear tenderly.''
''You aren't far from us, I'm on your deck, in your time the water only has salt and flies and shrimp that the birds like and the lake is far away--where the rivers come out there are still many little swimmers.
“People lived there if they caught us they wouldn't eat us, but the lake got hard anyway, salt everywhere and hungry--we got hungry.''
''My Daddy, Poseidon says to say we are far from you in time but not space, we are way up on the benches. We are friends with our pods on the Toelle bench, swanky for a fish--me'n Poseidon tease about fish. We aren't fishes, We are Sirenia.''
''My daddy you know. . . Your Alaya loves you.'' A shadow detached from a distant pod and swam toward them, a large pink dolphin. Alaya stroked its nose.''This is my Professor. He says to tell you he has studied many fields of human wisdom.''
Bruce wanted to get snappish, a family word for how Bruce Bunny sometimes got and asked in his authoritative voice-- ''Who's the father of your calf. Patience, Bruce Bunny old boy, diplomacy. He'd actually gone to Priesthood and they had had a lesson on working with and assisting thier teens to manage their sexual health. The candy bowl of condoms in the entry, the pregnancy test and the morning after pill in the family medicine cabinet, long a gentile custom, had finally filtered through the Zion curtain. Amniocentesis had not.
''OK sis,'' Bruce said cheerily, which one made your belly big.''
Alaya laughed. ''Nobody makes it big Daddy. It happens when we grow up, first the red water and a year later we choose our name and our baby's name. And then everyone helps when we calve.
Poseiden, pensive, began to vocalize, Alay listened and answered him softly back. The dream shifted. Bruce was briefly aware of Karina's warmth behind him then he spun away from Karina into mystery and mist.
Now neither young nor old. in the way, in the middle of the way, Daddy Bruce Bunny soaked in the memory of Sting-Fly springs, with Karinna and all the Andrus cousins in Orderville. Summers that evokedhis kissing cousin Karina.
During his first, batchelor mission, his novia had waited for him. Karinna, now his wife, cuddled towared him as she wrote on her night computer. She woke Bruce, whatcha dreaming about, sweetpea.''
''Pregnant, Bruce moaned, such a dear thing, and to be heavy with child and so far away now. . . pregnant, my little girl's pregnant.''
''Which little girl, which is pregnant.''
''Not Livvy.'' Karina said.
''Not Rigel....''
Rigel, hearing his name, climbed over his father and began to look for a way to undo his mother's jammies.
She reluctantly unzipped her bodice for him before he launched a furious protest, which at the present pass would turn her sleeping house into a re-animated hornets nest.
''Livvy. What year is this. Where's Olivia.''
Bruce if it's Celeste or Clary I'm going to have to wake you up. You're asleep, Bruce.'' Karina whispered in her husband's ear. You're late too, you know, and for the most important of dates.''
Bruce's Alaya appeared, then swam so swiftly away that Bruce cried out for her. When Karina woke him and he knew himself to be Bruce of Alpine with the two girls and the cousins.
The house was of the old design, side by side living areas with a divided loft for the boys and girls. The haunted nursery was just back of the West Kitchen. It had been Alaya's room, but remembering her, Bruce and Karina never wanted to use it as a bedroom again.
CHAPTER
Karina’s morning class at School was a half an hour before Karina’s sister picked up Livvy for the Children’s school. In that half hour Lizzy had gotton got a notion at notion, one that seemed somewhat naughty, but a compulsion.
She got the step latter and reached around to open the glass French door of the China cabinit which held Daddy’s glass carosel with the sparkling green dragonflies.
Karina had bolted that cabinet securely to the studs behind it. Time had been her enemy. People had leaned against the China Cabinet Heavy Anders men and over those 12 years had leaned against it, the screws bolting the red cedar cabinet gradually were stripped. Small as she was, Livvy’s slight weight sent the heavy cabinet crashing sideways breaking the tiles on the floor. Little Livvy fell on top of it. Beside her, glass was everywhere.
The worst thing, the worst possible thing was that the dragonfly carosel shattered. Lizzy, sitting on her on her heels tried to pick the beloved green dragonflies out of the glass, but was too smaal to rescue them without kneeling. She knelt, howling at the top of her lungs.
Livvy had broken Daddy’s birthday. What would happen if her Daddy Bunny didn’t have any more birthdays. Ever.
CHAPTER
Caleb was the Daddy who made the seed Daddy Bruce put in Mommy Karina so Celeste and she and Rigel wouldn’t for sure die like Alaya and their dead brother Timothy, was just getting into his car to go to work. He ran up the hill to find Lizzy not too badly hurt, though her legs ran with glass and blood. All the King’s Horses and all the King’s men couldn’t fix Daddy’s birthday. Livvy sobbed out, “I broke it.”
“Livvy,” Caleb chided. “The front door popped open. Karina ran in with Rigel. “I’ve got a open book final and I forgot the book.” She stopped short and put down Ri.
What in the name of God and Heaven. She flipped her cell open and punched a button. “We’ve got an emergency. Is Professor Chrone there? .....Then make him available.”
“No, no broken bones it looks like,’’ Karina said ’but a heck of a lot of blood, and that’s not the worst of it.” Livvy howled in support. “Thankyou for your cooperation.”
“My TA is here but he’s a rookie."
Ross said on the other end of the wireless. lHave you ever administered a final? Administer the final.”
“Daddy’s birthday.” Livvy sobbed.
“I’ll call mother,” Karina said, flipping open the cell. At the same moment the Gothic ghost detector to play a fuge, counting ghosts from the hauntened nursery.
“Ma?”
“Holy Moses she said, it’s coming from from the old nursery,” She went into the room she and her mother had decorated for Alaya and then Timmy--it’s reading out 20 degrees. Looks like 3 entities, oops, there’s another one.”
Silenced, Livvy gaped at her Mommy. “Three ghosts?.” Livvy gaped, distracted. Caleb was franticly looking for the first aid kit.
“You borrowed it.” Karina accused.
“And Bruce borrowed it back.”
“Damn.” Caleb said, the profany odd in Karina’s Kitchen, “Hold down the fort, Maybe Sheila found ours and put it away. Back in a jiff.”
“Ma, help.” Karina said, still on the phone, I’m late for my final.” Lizzy began to s grouting around in the shattered glass. When she opened her hands she had been holding three emerald c dragonflies tightly in her fist, which were bleeding. “There are six.” Lizzy said, starting to cry again. “3 from 6 makes 3,” very good Livy.
“Oh, Karina said,” She got a Latex glove and found the other three dragonfles. She put all the dragonflies in it a fruit jar, grabbed a cap and capped it tight She handed it over into Livvy’s undamaged hand.”
“Let’s start with a shower, and don’t touch anywhere you’ve got glass. Mebbe we can rinse some of it out while Caleb is trying to find the tweezers. Then you won’t sit on it in the car and make the cuts worse.”
Carina led Olivia into the master bedroom shower, detached the shower head. Rigel was trying to pick some of the other figurines out of the glass.” followed. “Livvy broke the birthday.” Rigel said.”
Caleb ran into the front door hitting it heavily, sliding on the spring ice before he was able to turn the doorknob. Jesus f-ing Christ what’s wrong with Rigel.”
“Now I don’t want Ri-ri to hear his Daddy swear.” Karina teased. “Let’s sing something or something.”
Karina began to hose the standing Livvy down, she began “Yesterday a child was full of wonder, caught a dragonfly inside a jar . . . ‘’
Livvy struggled to supress her sobbing, Karina sang as Caleb picked up Rigel. “You know, I might not have any other boys. Next time lets have twins.”
“Maybe it’s something to do with the site.” Karina said” We’ve got so many twins at the school it feels like “The Shining.”
‘’And the seasons,” Caleb sang,
“Go round and round, the painted ponies go up and down-- we’re captive on a carosel of time. . .”
We can’t return we can only go around from where we came--and go round and round in the circle game . . .
“Ghosts, Caleb said. as the Ghost detector went on noisily.
The scouts will be green with envy.
“Let them eat Cake,” Karina said.
“There is still cake? I baked it over to mother’s last night.” She picked up the cellular and called her mother who had not left yet.
“Better.” She aswered. “Could you bring the cake?”
“I was just packing it up.” Grammy asked, Hows things.”
“It would be nice if shattered things put themselves together again, wouldn’t it?” Karinna asked. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.”
“The Kingsmen just make it worse, don’t you find? Did you get any sleep last night?” Karina’s hushed a child at her side.
“Maybe a half an hour. I had to see Bruce off at the airport.”
“I bet.” her mother laughed.
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